Hello all,

The Spring 2019 Exemplar Wave (Wave #17) is published and available for your perusal.

The Wave 17 review is complete and the nominations are posted on Judgeapps! You can see nominations you gave and received here or use the search tool to see all the awesome things your fellow judges are doing; at home, at events, online, or in their community.

If you received a nomination, you will receive an email with instructions for the next step within a week. (spoilers: It will be a link to a Google form that looks a lot like last time)

Additionally, if you discover you cannot find a nomination that you wrote, that means it was deferred or rejected. We will be providing a personalized email explaining why the nomination was deferred or rejected. These emails will be sent in batches over the next week starting on Thursday. Your deferred slot will appear in Judgeapps for Wave 18 nearly immediately.

As a reminder, Exemplar Wave 18 closes on Tuesday Aug. 13th at 23:59 PST

Vanguard Update

This Vanguard update is going to be a little different.  In the past the Exemplar token has represented a Magic Judge who received an exceptionally praiseworthy nomination.  That was the plan for this wave as well.  In fact, we attempted to raise the bar and do something significantly different from what we normally do.  However, like many things, when you attempt something you haven’t done before there are unexpected delays.  Because of these delays, we were not able to secure all the needed pieces in time to get the tokens printed this wave.  On an unbearably tight deadline, we opted to move the planned Vanguard to next wave, and find a near term replacement for this wave’s Tokens.

Normally, to select a Vanguard, we have a voting process, contact the selected judge to find out if they want to be represented, and ask fur a reference photo and creature type.  We then have creative conversations with the artist, Ken Meyer Jr.  Beclaws this process can take a significant amount of time depending on how responsive the judge is, we didn’t have time for even quick paws in email responses.  We were faced with the grizzly choice of not using a judge for the Vanguard token.  We were able to use Modern Horizons as an opportunity to make koalaty tokens of everyone’s favorite vanilla 2/2.  Say hello to this wave’s token!

I want to give a huge thanks to Ken Meyer Jr. for working with us through the delays, and for making the art for this waves token on very short notice.